#6: Annieslands
A guest post from Joanna Pidcock on 'personal writing,' focusing on Annie Lord and Annie Ernaux.
I have a confession.
I have saved a series of emails to my first boyfriend, written as we were in the process of breaking up. Some part of me believes they are the best thing I have ever written. They are a window into a first heartbreak, a feeling so surprising and strong that I genuinely thought it might kill me. A year after it happened, I went back to read them again and was shocked by the clarity of the prose, the unfiltered tenderness and desperation, the precision with which I was able to describe the things around me, and how they reflected my own pain. I was speaking in a language that only had one other speaker, pleading with him not to break my heart. I was bearing witness to an experience that was rearranging all the cells in my body, an experience that can only happen for the first time once. I was writing the distance between before and after.
I don’t think I’ll ever write anything so beautiful again; I’ll certainly never have access to those feelings, untempered by experience and time and perspective, pure virgin springs. A record of the first time someone really, truly looked at me. I will never show those emails to another living soul.
***
I am the first person singular, a single woman in my late twenties living in a big city, a woman who experiences the various joys and indignities of being young and alive and unattached. Now that I write with the expectation that people I don’t know might read it, I have thought about the emails a lot. What would it mean to publish them, or to incorporate them into something? What is the boundary between my private self, and my art, which is usually about my private self to some degree? There is an expectation of my voice. There is an assumption from the reading public that as a young woman writing, I will always write about my own life. Even if I fictionalise it, if the voice belongs to a young woman, it must be me. There is an expectation that my life is a parallel narrative to the ones that I write, with characters and plot twists, and fleeting observations charged with meaning. That I will drag the cadaver of my personal life onto the operating table and dissect it in front of an audience. That I’m charming and shameless, desperate and sophisticated, abject and in control, all at the same time. A mess, but together enough to potentially write and publish a book.
When Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature in October, with the Nobel committee announcing that they had awarded on Ernaux for ‘the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory’. The phrase ‘clinical acuity’ is interesting to me: ‘acuity’ suggests sharpness and precision, while ‘clinical’ speaks to impartiality and a cool and professional, almost institutionalised, remove. Annie Ernaux cleanly excavates the facts of her life and examines them from a distance, shaping them into something that doesn’t feel like a narrative, but more like an account or a testimony. In Shame she wrote ‘I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself’, a task that has consumed her entire career. She deliberately questions, and very often rejects the primacy of first-person women’s writing and its assumed relationship to truth, especially in the case of The Years, which is written in the third person and further expands the gap between herself as narrator and herself as subject. Instead of confessing to a series of scandalous acts, she ruthlessly investigates her responses to those acts, interrogating every decision she’s made and why she made it. It is brave to expose yourself with a complete lack of sentimentality or artifice courage and clinical acuity. Annie Ernaux writes with a scalpel dipped in her own blood.
Vogue dating columnist Annie Lord wrote her first book this year. Notes on Heartbreak is a detailed account of a breakup she went through only a couple of years ago. She writes about the relationship itself and then its dissolution, charting her own emotional turmoil and attempts at growth and regeneration. She quotes Simone de Beavoir, Eat Pray Love, Zora Neale Hurston, both Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and somehow makes them all say something about the end of her relationship with her university boyfriend. The book is overlong, negligently edited, tonally and intellectually insecure, and ultimately about a breakup that is deeply, spectacularly average. Quotations from other texts are used only to illustrate, almost justify, the events of Lord’s own life, with no curiosity around the texts themselves beyond their application to her specific situation. It is as though Lord knows deep down that there is nothing particularly notable about either the relationship or the breakup, but by linking her heartbreak to a Zora Neale Hurston quote about racism, it will somehow be dignified or charged with extraordinary meaning. A more judicious editor would have made some serious cuts throughout the book, particularly to the latter half, where Lord goes on one average date after another, each described in detail, and then tells her friends exactly when she has just told us. The oft-repeated virtue of show don’t tell becomes show, and then tell, and then tell once more in case we missed it. Lord makes a virtue of confession as an end in itself rather than a means to something else. The book is effectively a log of acts, revealed to an audience in the expectation of implicit absolution. It feels like a mechanism for dumping information, allowing her to move forward without necessarily taking responsibility for any of it, or expressing any kind of curiosity in what comes after the act of unburdening, and how to look clearly at your own exposed soul.
***
I told a friend about my emails. He is also a writer, one whose work I respect and admire, and he challenged me immediately when I suggested they were the best thing I’ve written. He told me that ‘best’ is a lazy signifier, and in any case, surely I could be a bit more specific and illustrative about the precise ways in which I think they are good - I am, after all, a writer.
And so I looked closer. The emails are perhaps the clearest thing I’ve written, or the most emotionally resonant. They’re definitely the most manipulative and pointed, but as my friend rightly said, the implication of ‘best’ is flattening. Why do I think this? I have written lots of things, and I have written with deliberation and care on subjects that are important to me. People who are considered to be arbiters of taste have told me that the writing is good. People who have read the writing have told me that it moved them, or made them think, or took them somewhere else for a little while. There is a kind of performative self-deprecation in the act of even admitting to the emails, publicly stating that despite all of the considered, crafted writing I have done, I’ll never do anything so good as when I was writing by accident.
There is a possibility that I think of the emails in this way because it is what the wider marketplace tells me - this writing is my best, because I am a young woman writing about myself, and therefore the rawest and most unfiltered confession, the thing that plumbs the darkest and most desperate depths of my personal life, is what the world expects and wants from me. In this scenario, it doesn’t matter whether or not the craft of the writing is actually good, the metric for quality is more related to the mode of confession. How much of myself have I poured out? In the striptease where I slowly pull off the veneer of my public persona; the respectability, the mediation of myself for an audience, the protection of some private and sacred core, how far have I gone? How much of me can you see?
I think about the emails all the time, and the root of my desire to return to them. It feels kind of perverse. It also feels like an inevitable fulfilment of expectation.
***
I much prefer Annie Lord’s weekly Vogue column, which is more self-aware than her book, and is a generally enjoyable reflection on modern dating. The columns seem written specifically to be shared in discreet little bits, a skillful deployment of SEO; a slightly cynical repackaging and translation of emotion into trackable, monetised clicks. They’re written for an audience who have shared similar experiences - they’re intensely, deliberately, sometimes wonderfully relatable. There’s a studied, polished glibness that makes them feel like personalised dispatches from a friend, heightened by the experience of reading them on a phone. When she shares them on social media, there is almost always someone in the comments saying loved this so much!! or something similar. Lord writes as the patron saint of the group chat, the Oracle at Delphi for The Girls.
Annie Ernaux’s Nobel win this year really got The Girls going. Cries of this is a win for the girlies!! resounded around the internet, city girls UP. The win was a victory, apparently, for every woman who had been on a bad date or had a generic and fumbling casual sexual encounter or endured a situationship longer than the average term of a pregnancy, vindication for anyone down bad, anyone who’s taken an L in the game of love. All of these responses speak to Ernaux also having a degree of relatability, as though her books occupy a similar space to Lord’s writing - a slightly gossipy confession of some minor indiscretion that happens to the best of us, rather than an unblinking detailing of an extended affair with an unavailable man, and the terrifying depths of her want for him. It goes without saying that this response to Ernaux’s work completely ignores her career-long engagement with shifting class barriers in French society, and how her own working class upbringing in Normandy is suffused into everything she has ever written - nowhere more clearly than in the two books she wrote about her parents, A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story.
I’m interested in the idea that online, these two writers are seen to have the same audience, and by extension are seen to be doing kind of the same thing. The language that this sentiment is expressed in is defined by its existence in the public space of social media. It is crowdsourced by a public, and spoken and shared within it. The marketplace that has created demand for the confessions of women as their primary artistic output is decisively, if not completely, formed online, by and for this public. A lot of confessional writing doesn’t enter the private space at all; it is written in a public language, spoken in a public space - the same public language and space that is used to respond to the work. The illusion of this rapidly produced, market-driven confessional writing being somehow private is just that: an illusion.
Ernaux’s writing on the other hand comes out of her diaries – she has kept a diary since the age of 16, and is now 82 – which she then distills and shapes, sometimes many years after the fact, tracking her own personal archaeology as it is changed by events over time. This careful translation of language from a private form to a public one mirrors the way in which Ernaux writes from a place of examining how her private self interfaces with the world. Her medium is time, which means that her medium is really change - the archaeology of the self from a distance, and the muscularity of digging down through the strata of a life, observing how time shifts and transfigures the geology of a human soul. It’s bearing witness to the self, rather than confessing sins. As such, Ernaux’s writing is spare and precise, clear and strong with the gut punch gasp of drinking really, really nice vodka. Time means that Ernaux can talk about bigger things than herself, or her self within the context of bigger things; the big broad sweeps of progress and society and what it means to observe and participate in granular change.
Annie Lord is writing from the middle of her own emotions, still liquid and present and muddy. The urgency of her confession means that she overestimates how interesting it actually is - event after mildly scandalous event blinds the reader to any kind of wider narrative of change or growth. It’s anathema to the clarity and distillation of a story, perhaps because the book itself came out of her columns. The writing hasn’t necessarily been through the filter of the private, where it can be considered without an audience, and so Lord puts all of it on the page, seemingly indiscriminately, almost certainly in a hurry. Lord seems to write outwards, spreading her confessions around and moving forward on a flat and featureless plain, whereas Ernaux is writing downwards, digging into the essence of a single feeling or event, further and further down until she reaches some molten core of truth.
***
Sometimes I think that the real reason I keep returning to the emails is less about them as a body of writing, and more about the transgression of putting them before an indiscriminate audience. I think about how The Girls would respond — would this writing be considered relatable? Would I become some kind of chronicler of what it means to be young and alive and flayed open after a heartbreak? Part of me wants to be one of The Girls; to be able to master that seductive, pithy register. I have tried: when Annie Ernaux won the Nobel, I went on my Twitter circle and wrote: ‘patron saint of neurotic women who love to have a fling (me)’. I did the very thing that I found frustrating; flattening Ernaux’s body of work into something that exists to comment on my ultimately very banal and unexceptional dating life, because it’s intoxicating to be able to write in that tone, participate in that online culture. While the register might be used to flatten and compress complex things into simply expressed, caustically witty throw-aways, it’s difficult to write in. To speak in the language of The Girls actually requires knowledge of an incredibly complex set of references and contexts, the glib weaponisation of a tangled constellation of texts for public kudos, but also for the joy of crafting an obscure reference into something richly, darkly funny.
I’m afraid of The Girls. I’m afraid that the register of talking and thinking like that is structurally opposed to complexity - it doesn’t hold the capacity or vocabulary for nuanced argument. Which isn’t to say that The Girls as individuals aren’t capable of this, but rather that the collective discourse lacks the framework for that kind of conversation. Perhaps there are considered conversations about these texts happening offline, around kitchen tables or on sharehouse sofas, but online there doesn’t seem to be the space to look at Annie Lord and Annie Ernaux and see that they’re actually doing completely different things. I’m afraid of the snarky subtweet, or making a decision online that is a betrayal of an unspoken solidarity. I’m afraid that this essay will invoke their wrath, because my thoughts about this are knotty and complex and it would be much easier to flatten them. I’m afraid of being an enemy to that all important state: relatability.
In truth, the emails were written for an audience: the only person on earth who could actually understand the complicated web of references and experiences and personal jokes that form the language in which they are written, the lingua franca of our relationship. They are a virtuosic display of that language, its defining and only extant text. Showing them to anyone else would necessarily smooth and plane them, turning my pain into something relatable rather than something heartbreakingly specific. It would be easier to flatten this experience into something that can be shared, just like it is easier to flatten the emails themselves into my ‘best’ writing, or to flatten myself into a young woman who should be writing what the market demands of me — finely wrought confessional work about sex and heartbreak.
Like in that work, an assumption has been made here that my confession is true. That I have written this in good faith, and my ‘I’ is therefore a genuine window into my soul that I’ve opened for an audience, turning myself inside out so that my private self is entirely public. Come in and look around! Make yourselves comfortable. Perhaps you’ve read this far hoping for a salacious taste of the emails, some anecdote or detail that will cast a rich and salty shadow over one side of that public face. Or perhaps you’ve realised that the emails may be a device, a promiscuous way into talking about other things that are more interesting and important, a way to game expectations of my writing, of what kind of essay this could or should be. I’ve lifted my arms so that a sliver of skin between my jumper and my jeans is a visible invitation to imagine what’s underneath, soft and smooth cream peach fuzz. The beginning of a story about how that skin looked under someone else’s gaze, how someone’s fingers raised a trail of goosebumps tracing over its surface. Maybe I’ll tell you about it! I probably won’t.
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